Dead Cave
Wednesday, May 25th, 2005A few years ago, I did with Oded a nice travel in western Europe. Among other places, we went to see a nice cave in the middle of France. I think its name is grottes-la-cave. It is a very big cave, with several halls, full of stalactites and stuff, but the frenchmen killed the cave: they put concrete on the floor, electrical lights everywhere, and all was very guided and touristic and commercialized.
At Jenola Caves they took it one step further: here the guides have a remote control to turn on and off separate light bulbs to color specific stalagmites and stalactites.
The caves themselves are huge (I visited just one cave, and it took over 1.5 hour of guided tour - you can’t go inside without a guide). The cave I visited have many halls, with funny names (’the cathedral’, ‘the exhibition’, and so forth) and not so many stalactites (actually, I think our Avshalom cave at Sorek Reserve is more beautiful). The cave, however, is very similar to the french one - the route is marked with concrete, handrails are all over it, and all the electricity - the guide said they are even having concerts inside the cave twice a month.
More beautiful than the cave was the way to it. It is located at the other side of the Blue Mountains (e.g., not the Sydney side but the inland, western, side) so we had to cross the mountains and than proceed in the valley west to the mountains, on their shadow. The land here resembles very much the Golan (Lior, you would love it!), full of small hills with yellow grass and bush, every now and then you see cows and eucaliptus trees. When climbing the mountains again it was really similar to the small roads that climb the Golan from the Hula, with all the eucaliptuses on both sides and the road being very small and taking many curves - actually, there was a part there that looked just like the road from Gonen to Gadot, by the Jordan River, only that here its length was a few dozens of kilometres. The mountains themselves are very beautiful, with many different trees - pines, eucaliptuses, and more. We crossed them again and started to go north along the shore highway. We reached Newcastel and booked here for the night.
The australians really have something about England and English names - half of their towns are named after English towns (on our way here we crossed, for example, Windsor). They don’t behave like the Englishman sent their parents to the end of the world - they actually love very much being English, at least in their culture.
